


A Twisted Dichotomy

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Heavy Angst, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 18:18:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9619394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Nyx did for Noctis what Ravus never cared enough to do...  Nyx gave him love and Ravus gave him hate, a twisted dichotomy between which they traded.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nicrt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicrt/gifts).



> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/156177493552/are-prompts-still-accepted-because-heres-an-evil) for [nicrt.](https://nicrt.tumblr.com/)

He wouldn’t let himself feel regret. This was an inevitability he’d always been prepared for, from the very start. As evidenced by how furiously his swords flew at Ravus, Noctis had not been. 

The prince’s eyes burned hot with rage and betrayal. His city was slowly turning to ash around him, daemons and Magitek and massive Lucii guardians kicking down the proud, shimmering buildings like they were children’s building blocks. It was like he couldn’t even see it though, so intense was his hatred for Ravus.

Ravus had expected that, too. The armiger was easy enough to deflect. It was incomplete and clumsily wielded. Between Noctis’s inexperience and compromised emotions, defeating him was practically effortless. Ravus was stalling, he knew that he was. He had a hundred openings that Noctis failed to close. _So why aren’t you taking any of them? Why aren’t you taking **him**? It’s not as if you haven’t done it before._

In the end, it didn’t matter. Noctis wore himself out trying to whither Ravus’s defenses. Sweat and dust and soot were smeared across his face, plastering his hair over his eyes. Blood dripped from his mouth, bright against his skin, skin that he’d allowed Ravus to devour and abuse to satiate a lust neither of them had ever fully understood. Today, it wasn’t possession that Ravus inflicted upon him; it was obligation to a country that was his sovereign’s, duty to an Emperor’s ambitions that he was raised to oblige. His loyalties had never changed. He thought Noctis knew that.

“Why?” the prince asked him, a greatsword leaden in his hands. “I thought…”

Conflict warred within Noctis, something he’d only let Ravus see once before because he couldn’t control it. He fell apart with someone else, not with Ravus. Which worked out perfectly. Because Ravus didn’t care to see it.

“You had to know this would happen one day,” he told Noctis, rapier swiping at his greatsword in a challenge.

Noctis flinched back a step, stumbling over his own feet, and Ravus didn’t hesitate this time. His rapier slid up the length of the phantom blade, threatening to carve Noctis in two from navel to temple. The prince bolted back, releasing his weapon in the process and leaving his chest open for a hard kick that sent him sprawling back onto the hard ground. His head knocked back against a piece of rubble and the breath raced out of him in a horrifying gush.

Ravus pretended not to feel the change in his own heartbeat when Noctis’s chest stilled. It was only a moment before it moved again, heaving to catch what it had lost. Noctis reached a shaky hand to the back of his head, wincing and blinking rapidly. There was blood on his fingers when he withdrew it, and his eyes rolled in a desperate struggle to stay conscious. Ravus approached him, knowing what had to be done and resolved to it – no matter what his heart tried to tell him to the contrary. Through the fog in his eyes, Noctis saw him, and struggled to summon a weapon before Ravus reached him and slammed a boot against his wrist, pinning his sword-arm to the ground.

Ravus pulled him up by the front of his shirt, bringing the prince’s body up to meet the point of his sword. Noctis shuddered, teeth bit down on a plea for mercy. He knew he wouldn’t get it. Instead he glared through a sheen of mist in his eyes up at Ravus. They were the most expressive that they’ve ever been for the Commander. They were guarded when they were in his bed, letting only the anger at a life Noctis had never wanted bleed out into their violent dalliance. The anger was still there now, but it was surrounded by torture, by pain, by something else Ravus refused to acknowledge.

“What did you think would happen?” Ravus asked him, feeling a sting of anger himself. “We were always fated for this.”

“Screw fate,” Noctis growled, coughing on his own blood. “Lives are made with choices, Ravus. It’s not too late for you to make one.”

“I have.”

Even to his own ears, the words sounded as cold as the steel he would soon plunge into the prince’s heart. They sent a chill through his own blood, calming whatever twitches of doubt still tried to draw his blade away. Fear bled like an open wound through Noctis’s eyes, and this cold creature that had consumed Ravus _loved_ it. Enough to kiss him one last time and remember what he would miss about him.

He’d miss the way he could destroy his voice so Noctis was hoarse the next day. He’d miss how sharp the prince’s teeth felt in Ravus’s shoulder when he tried to challenge him. He’d miss making him pay for it. He’d miss the heat and he’d miss the cooldown. He’d miss beating inside of Noctis all of his envy in him and all of his hatred in himself. He’d miss the feeling of peace it brought him afterwards, no matter how fleeting that peace may be.

The colder part of him told him he wouldn’t miss any of that. Because the object of it all would be gone. He withdrew his lips from Noctis’s blood-stained teeth and found his eyes, full of one last entreaty and a resignation. Something unsaid passed between them, a mutual nostalgia for something that never was, but may have been if either of them had tried. There was an understanding in Noctis’s eyes that Ravus hated because it forced his heart to twist. Forced him to doubt. Damn him for that.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you wanted,” he said, rapier pressed against his heaving chest.

“I’m sorry too.”

To his credit, Noctis didn’t shed any tears. Not for himself and certainly not for Ravus. Rebellious to the very end. Why did that make Ravus hesitate again? It was only for a flicker, but it was enough to let the air boom beside him like it’d been torn in half, and for the man to emerge from the sparks that tear made, and barrel into him.

Ravus was thrown off his feet, skidding across the stone and the concrete and all the broken pieces of Insomnia. When he stopped, he had just enough time to hear the next thunder of the Crystal’s power and raise his rapier to catch the two blades which descended upon him. Nyx roared at him, feral as a daemon in his wrath. Ravus pushed all of his weight into his rapier to haul him off. Nyx warped back, wielding some distance between him and his opponent.

“Come and try that again, Nif scum!”

The glaive _spit_ at him. As if Ravus were a mere masked grunt and not the face of the army, not of the blood of the Oracle, not the sole son of Tenebrae. He’d always hated that about him; the defiance, the lack of regard for lineage, how he thought he was so much _better_ than him and Ravus knew that he was, that he was right. _Nif scum_. He’d stopped being the Prince of Tenebrae a long time ago.

“I’m surprised you’re still alive, Ulric. General Glauca should have made short work of you.”

“Shoulda coulda woulda. How ‘bout you come on over here and have a turn? Help me beat my record.”

His kukris spun dangerously in his hands, glinting scarlet in the light from the fires, goading Ravus into meeting them with his sword. There was a fury well beyond the standard Lucian prejudice towards Niflheim in the steel-cut edge of his glare. It was more than vengeful patriotism for the home Ravus had helped burn down. Nyx’s hatred was personal. The Commander had threatened the life of his prince. He’d tried to kill the man Nyx loved. Ravus ceased being a person to him the second he raised his sword to Noctis.

“Nyx, don’t,” Noctis croaked.

The knight didn’t take his eyes off of Ravus, the only indication that he’d heard the order being the cessation of his anxiously spinning blades. His gaze narrowed, red-edged and dark with the smoke and the avarice. He carefully fell back to the prince, keeping one dagger poised between them and Ravus as he checked Noctis’s wounds.

“We’ve gotta go,” Noctis was saying, trying to crawl to his feet.

Nyx steadied a hand around the back of his head, expression sobering at the sight of the blood trickling down it. “Easy does it, little king. Just gotta - ”

“Leave ‘im. Less jus’ get outta here… Please.”

Nyx’s glare flickered back to Ravus, wary and hungry to make him suffer. Ravus stared back, head turning slightly on its side, watching Noctis. The prince gazed back, eyes unfocused but adamant. Ravus thought he was trying to spare his lover a swift demise by ordering him off the attack, but the longer Ravus watched him, he realized that the one he was trying to spare was Ravus himself.

His fist clenched around the hilt of his sword. _You think I can’t take your mongrel of Galahd? **Me?**_ He wouldn’t be insulted by Noctis’s misplaced mercy. He’d kill the both of them if they made him, offering no mercy of his own… And yet, Ravus didn’t move. Not as Nyx slid his arm beneath Noctis and lifted the half-conscious prince to his feet. Not as he slowly picked his way across the shattered road, staring him down and daring him to make a move.

Ravus tried to call back the coldness that had nearly seized the prince’s life, tried to force it into how hard he clutched his rapier at his side, so hard that the gilded metal cut into the inside of his palm. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t bring it back. Couldn’t make himself march after them. He met Nyx’s eyes over the bloodied black hair of Noctis against his shoulders.

Nyx did for Noctis what Ravus never cared enough to do. He loved him. His touches were tender, his words sweet, his heart completely and unrepentantly beholden to Noctis. Nyx gave him love and Ravus gave him hate, a twisted dichotomy between which they traded.

In the charged space between them, Ravus relented entirely the economics of their arrangement. Noctis had always been Nyx’s to keep, and Ravus would let him. He’d let them go, and no matter how much the tiny light inside his chest tried to burst behind his eyes and tell him why he allowed it, he refused to let it shine. He watched their backs as they stumbled through the collapsing city. He watched Noctis cast his gaze back one last time, pitying him.

He hadn’t spared them, Ravus told himself. The order was to capture, not kill the prince. A fate worse than death, given that the hands he’d be delivered to upon his seizure would be Ardyn Izunia’s. The coldness resolved something in Ravus again. It was a contradiction. Noctis had showed him mercy. Dishonored though he was, buried down deep though it was, morality urged Ravus to return the favor. Death. He would hunt the both of them down, nod to the order that he was to kill the knight and capture the prince, and kill the both of them instead.

That was the only mercy he could offer them.


End file.
